Source to preamp or integrated. If a turntable, then turntable wiring/cable and tonearm wiring.
It’s a careful balancing act of understanding the gear and the cable.
Eg, dark system so you get a cable which exaggerates highs in an edgy fashion and then you thinly you’ve got clarity and balance...but no....
What you’ve really got is two wrongs eq’d out against one another... and the perceived clarity is not signal, it’s actually signal based hash, distortion, and noise.
First the signal is gone missing with the dark gear and then what’s left is distorted into false highs and transients that are bloated and dirty, via the screechy cable. It’s a grotesquery.
Figuring this sort of thing out can take a bit of time.
In the example above, it would be best to start with more neutral gear and then more neutral cables, instead something that plays out like two cars tied together with a rope and each doing burnouts trying to pull each the other way.
When you do it right, then... more music of various quality becomes listenable and you get to train your ears and brain is what is RIGHT, instead of flavored distortion. You have to have the correct signal representation there in order to recognize it, so it’s a catch 22 of a sort. It will take time to lean to hear it.
It’s a big deal, a very big deal, it’s the whole freaking enchilada.
We need more people recognizing these issues in this way.
So, before we talk cable, what exactly is neutral gear? how does it exist, what does it do? It’s not really money spent, its...something else. Quality parts put together by a wise mind into a neutral piece of gear.
But they are rare.
Everybody talks neutral, but they all have their own ideas on what it is. It’s a human hearing problem in learning, time, and individual physical make up. This goes for the designers as well. Surprisingly few know a anything about the science of psychoacoustics and how we hear.
Neutral is more rare than the dark or bright pieces of gear, as color sells, color is what charms people. It’s why you can’t get any food that does not have some over the top bit of either salt, sugar, fat, etc, as balance and reason....does not sell.
Eg, you can’t take a ’revealing’ source device and hook it up with ’revealing’ cables to go to a ’revealing’ amp and then through ’revealing’ speaker cables, and on to ’revealing’ speakers.
You’d burn the wallpaper off the house walls and the parakeet would explode.
In all honesty, the perfect piece of audio gear sounds imperceptibly slower, and imperceptibly darker than the source point signal.
To keep up the dark humour analogy.....if you take a bunch of audio designers of note, tie them to chairs and start cutting fingers off until you get the truth, they would all finally give in.... and say this. (that is, if they did not say it right away, some of them might enjoy having fingers. And dislike my communication methodology suggestions)
Anything else is a flavoring and lie.
In practice this is almost impossible to do and most noise in parts and that (parts) built out into a circuit/sytem or piece of finished gear ....inevitably sounds bright in some ways and dark in others.
Knowing these things when you begin, so you can train yourself to hear and listen appropriately, is important.
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If you read what I’ve said and want the whole picture, it says that everyone has to learn as much as they can and think it through and work at it and put in the time..and there are no easy answers. It’s a journey and each of us spirals off into the corner that works for us individually. You can’t throw money at it or push a button or hire someone to push the button for you. It’s on you. all on you. It’s your perceptive package and that perceptive package’s designs and limits.
And this is how we get into these long drawn out arguments that have no end point. As we’ve each found our own solution to this actually quite complex affair.
